GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 29: One Man Army

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Silent Assassin

The lead ganger opened the door, and was shocked when Specter greeted him with a flurry of cybernetic fists to the gut, that he somehow managed to block.  The Peacock, meanwhile, snuck out a side door and got the enemy netrunner in the neck with a taser dart, leaving them spasming on the floor.  Paxos fried one through the walls with a short circuit, and Jar punched the goon Specter had been working in the groin, the shock of which knocked him straight out with a short yelp.  Specter ran up to the last gangoon still on his feet and took him out with a blow to the solar plexus that sent him stumbling past The Peacock.  

The crew teamed up to stomp the 'runner until they were out of commission (with Jar, of all people, dealing the final blow), then dragged their defeated foes into the "body pile" in the excavation room and got back to digging.  Specter took a break, exhausted from the strain of his sandy and the chameleon skin, while Paxos kept watch through the walls with her Ping soft.  After another half-hour, their shovelling was rewarded with the satisfying *thunk* of metal-on-metal, and Jar got out the plasma cutter to break into the vault itself.

While he was cutting, another ganger came into Paxos' x-ray vision at the base of the stairs, and, though muffled through the doors, his voice was loud enough that they got the gist: he'd brought a bunch of the initiates to help move bodies.  The leader moved into the parking garage and asked where everyone was, in a shout, and where the lights were.  With some quick hacking into the dead netrunner and the shouting ganger's agents, she was able to send a message that appeared to be from the 'runner saying that they didn't want any kids getting in the way.

The gangoon bought it, and went back up the stairs.  To prevent anyone else from going into the parking garage, Paxos scrounged a set of lockpicks (conveniently in one of the pockets of the many unconscious and/or dead gangers!) and locked the door from the outside.  The Peacock went and checked the last door on the floor that nobody had investigated and discovered... a gender-neutral bathroom in pretty dire condition.  One of the toilets was somehow coated in something green everywhere but the bowl.  Satisfied there were no incoming threats from that direction, the crew all retreated back to the dig site to cover Jar.

He finished the cutting, and after the clang of metal on metal as the hole fell in, Jar asked if they'd brought anything to do about the potential nerve gas.  They hadn't.  The Peacock volunteered to climb down first while holding their breath, and when no alarms went off, they came back out and Jar went in to connect the vault to their batteries ("I'm going to stop right before I finish because I don't want to be in there when the nerve gas goes off").

While Jar worked on running the cables and drilling into cases to wire everything up, the dead netrunner's agent started ringing.  When Paxos checked it wirelessly, she found that it had an incoming call from the ganger who'd brought down the kids earlier.  She hung up and sent a text saying that they were in an area with poor reception and couldn't take calls.  Apparently they didn't buy it, because shortly a group of gangoons led by a big man came down the stairs and started knocking on the (now jammed) door to the parking garage.

Going Loud

Through the doors, they heard the leader shouting at the ganger who'd been calling the netrunner, saying that nobody could find them and their bikes were all still out back.  Sounded like the corpos who'd been there the day were still sniffing around.  The Peacock asked Jar how long he needed: twenty more minutes.  They didn't have that kind of time, so everyone picked up their weapons and got into position.  As they were aligning themselves just so using Paxos' Ping to see through walls, a latent virus from the dead 'runner's system overloaded her 'deck, rendering them blind.

Again, Specter toggled on his sandevistan and the chameleon skin and leapt out into the hallway, this time with rifle in hand, and opened fire.  In a single second, Specter gunned down four of gangoons, and the leader was only barely alive because of his now-shredded medium armourjack.  The Peacock finished him off with a charged shot from their tech pistol, and Jar took out the last goon with a shotgun blast to the face.

Since stealth had gone out the window some time during the gunfight, Specter sprinted up the stairs after pausing a fraction of a second to reload, in an effort to finish off every threat before his cyberware ran out.  The ground floor had once been a lobby and open-air office, but all that was left now was a couple benches and a front desk behind a small waist-high wall.  A pair of drunk gangers had been egging on two juves who had been beating the snot out of each other, but everyone had frozen after the gunfire.  Specter opened fire, instantly killing the two gangoons while raising his rifle to avoid hitting the teens.

The kids started sprinting to the front door, but Specter beat them there easily.  A pair of gangers who had been keeping watch outside were facing the door with pistols ready, but Specter acted too fast for them to follow and filled them full of lead.  As the juves turned to go for the back door instead, the rest of the crew finally made it up, and The Peacock and Paxos moved into position behind the waist-high wall, yelling for the kids to get on the floor, which they did.  Jar stayed at the staircase and kept an eye on the top floor in case anyone came running down.

Outside, something landed beside Specter and swung a katana at his neck which he barely knocked out of line with his gorilla gauntlet.  He staggered back and got a better look at his assailant, which seemed to be some kind of robot covered in white ceramic plates, its head replaced with a stumpy collection of sensors with no facial features at all.  More worryingly, it was moving at the same accelerated speed as he was.

Specter brought his rifle up and opened fire, but the robot swatted it out of the way with its second katana, so he dropped it and deployed the implanted SMG in his arm.  A double-burst of gunfire to the sensors on the stump elicited a torrent of blood, and the "robot", which apparently had meat inside after all, dropped into the doorway.  The Peacock glanced over and recognized the body as a Santo Domingo legend: the cyborg assassin Yokai, famed for using poisons.

Now that the gunfire had stopped for the moment, The Peacock was able to hear some movement up on the floor above them, and everyone turned to cover the stairs while Specter reloaded.  After several agonizing seconds, one of the teens stuck his head around the corner of the stairwell, then retreated.  The crew could have opened fire, but chose to stick to their ideal of not killing children.

When nobody had emerged after 5 seconds, The Peacock suggested they might be calling for backup, Specter charged the stairwell.  As he rounded the landing, he found six gangers with guns pointed directly at him.  One rifle, four revolvers, and a tech rifle which probably belonged to Sota Nagasawa.

Notes:

Turns out: fully-automatic weapons are strong.  Who would have guessed?  I think we were all surprised at just how strong they were, though, when used properly.  You can just make an attack on everyone within 30° and the only thing that happens is that Recoil gets worse?  At any rate, Specter has, in a single session, surpassed the combined kill count of every other PC by a wide margin.

Should guns be able to fire 3 times in one second due to ATR from a Sandevistan?  Realistically, no.  RAW says yes.

Everyone but The Peacock's player forgot about Specter's Chameleon Skin during the scuffle with Yokai.  Initially he was hit in the neck twice and failed the defence, but with the -5 to hit they failed the first attack and got less deceptive on the second which resulted in a parry, so it really came in clutch.

Rule of Cool Debate: should combatants with ATR alternate taking accelerated turns?  I liked the way Shadowrun 4e did it, where higher initiative ran through the same order at higher passes (equivalent to ATR).  We ultimately decided that no, it combatants just got all their turns in a row.  Surely this was only partially because it gave Specter an advantage.

Forgot to have Specter roll HT for his sandevistan, which is supposed to happen every 10 seconds.  So far it has been 21.